We know from George Sand’s letters the share that Dumas fils had in this work.  He helped her to take the play from her novel, and to write the scenario.  After this, when once the play was written, he touched up the dialogue, putting in more emphasis and brilliancy.  It was Dumas, therefore, who constructed the play.  We all know how careless George Sand was with her composition.  She wrote with scarcely any plan in her mind beforehand, and let herself be carried away by events.  Dumas’ idea was that the denouement is a mathematical total, and that before writing the first word of a piece the author must know the end and have decided the action.  Theatrical managers complained of the sadness of George Sand’s plays.  It is to Dumas that we owe the gaiety of the Duc d’Aleria’s role.  It is one continual flow of amusing speeches, and it saves the piece from the danger of falling into tearful drama.  George Sand had no wit, and Dumas fils was full of it.  It was he who put into the dialogue those little sayings which are so easily recognized as his.

“What do the doctors say?” is asked, and the reply comes: 

“What do the doctors say?  Well, they say just what they know:  they say nothing.”

“My brother declares that the air of Paris is the only air he can breathe,” says another character.

“Congratulate him for me on his lungs,” remarks his interlocutor.

“Her husband was a baron . . .” remarks some one.

“Who is not a baron at present?” answers another person.

A certain elderly governess is being discussed.

“Did you not know her?”

“Mademoiselle Artemise?  No, monsieur.”

“Have you ever seen an albatross?”

“No, never.”

“Not even stuffed?  Oh, you should go to the Zoo.  It is a curious creature, with its great beak ending in a hook. . . .  It eats all day long. . . .  Well, Mademoiselle Artemise, etc. . . .”

The Marquis de Villemer is in its place in the series of George Sand’s plays, and is quite in accordance with the general tone of her theatre.  It is like the Mariage de Victorine over again.  This time Victorine is a reader, who gets herself married by a Marquis named Urbain.  He is of a gloomy disposition, so that she will not enjoy his society much, but she will be a Marquise.  Victorine and Caroline are both persons who know how to make their way in the world.  When they have a son, I should be very much surprised if they allowed him to make a mesalliance.

George Sand was one of the persons f or whom Dumas fils had the greatest admiration.  As a proof of this, a voluminous correspondence between them exists.  It has not yet been published, but there is a possibility that it may be some day.  I remember, when talking with Dumas fils, the terms in which he always spoke of “la mere Sand,” as he called her in a familiar but filial way.